This letter is all about the latest version of our annual solicitation called Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Science (ROSES) for 2013, which was released on Thursday.

As always this solicitation contains within it dozens of individual calls on a wide range of subjects, from theory and modeling, to instrument development and laboratory experiments, mission data analysis and suborbital and balloon flights. The top level of the solicitation with links to the summary of solicitation and tables of due dates can be found at: http://solicitation.nasaprs.com/ROSES2013

Notices of Intent to propose and Step-1 proposal due dates start on 03/01/2013 and go through 01/24/2014. Full (and Step-2) proposal due dates start on 05/1/2013 and go through 06/02/2014.

The most important change from last year is that a number of calls for proposals, including all calls in Heliophysics (Appendix B), require proposal submission by a two-step process, in which a Notice of Intent (NOI) is replaced by a required Step-1 proposal. In most cases this is just a required NOI, but in other cases this is actually a mini proposal that will be evaluated. See Section IV(b)(vii) and the text of those program elements for details. Other calls that require a Step-1 proposal include: Land-Cover/Land-Use Change (Appendix A.2), Carbon Cycle Science (Appendix A.5), and the Cassini Data Analysis and Participating Scientists (Appendix C.10).

For your convenience below is a list of the Step-1 due dates

B.6 Step-1 proposals are due: 03/01/2013

B.4 Step-1 proposals are due: 03/15/2013

C.10 Step-1 proposals are due: 03/22/2013

A.5 Step-1 proposals are due: 05/01/2013

B.2 Step-1 proposals are due: 05/15/2013

B.7 Step-1 proposals are due: 05/15/2013

B.3 Step-1 proposals are due: 06/14/2013

B.5 Step-1 proposals are due: 08/15/2013

A.2 Step-1 proposals are due: 12/02/2013

Do please keep an eye on the tables of due dates on NSPIRES and the Amendments, those are the official versions.